My experience at the recently controversial conference/festival on prediction markets
Background
I recently attended the triple whammy of rationalist-adjacent events of LessOnline, Summer Camp, and Manifest 2024. For the most part I had a really great time, and had more interesting conversations than I can count. The overlap between the attendees of each event was significant, and the topics discussed were pretty similar.
The average attendee for these events is very smart, well-read, and most likely working in tech, consulting, or finance. People were extremely friendly, and in general the space initially felt like a high-trust environment approaching that of an average EAGlobal conference (which also has overlap with the rational-ish communities, especially when it comes to AI risks), even if the number of EA people there was fairly low–the events were very rationalist-coded.
Nominally, Manifest was about prediction markets. However, the organizers had selected for multiple quite controversial speakers and presenters, who in turn attracted a significant number of attendees who were primarily interested in these controversial topics, most prominent of which was eugenics.
This human biodiversity (HBD) or “scientific racism” curious crowd engaged in a tiring game of carefully trying the waters with new people they interacted with, trying to gauge both how receptive their conversation partner is to racially incendiary topics and to which degree they are “one of us”. The ever-changing landscape of euphemisms for I-am-kinda-racist-but-in-a-high-IQ-way have seemed to converge to a stated interest in “demographics”–or in less sophisticated cases the use of edgy words like “based”, “fag”, or “retarded” is more than enough to do the trick. If someone asks you what you think of Bukele, you can already guess where he wants to steer the conversation to.
The Guardian article
I
While I was drafting this post, The Guardian released a flawed article on Lightcone, who own the event venue Lighthaven, that a certain lawsuit claims was partially bought with FTX money (which Oliver Habryka from Lightcone denies). The article detailed some of the scientific racism special guests these past three events had.
In the past, The Guardian has released a couple of articles on EA that were a bit hit-piece-y, or tried to connect nasty things that are not really connected to EA at all to EA, framing them as representative of the entire movement. Sometimes the things presented were relevant to other loosely EA-connected communities, or some of the people profiled had tried to interact with the EA community at some point (like in the case of the Collinses, who explicitly do not identify as EA despite what The Guardian says. Collinses attempt to present their case for pro-natalism on the EA Forum was met mostly with downvotes), but a lot of the time the things presented were non-central at best, and I haven't seen strong evidence that would suggest that the Lightcone team is guilty of any wrongdoing.
Despite this, I think the core claim of "the event platformed a lot of problematic people" holds true. Some of the things in it I might object to (describing Robin Hanson as misogynistic in particular registers a bit unfair to me, even if he has written some things in bad taste), but for the most part I agree with how it describes Manifest. What is up with all the racists?
II
The article names some people who are quite connected to eugenics, HBD, or are otherwise highly controversial. They missed quite a few people[1], including a researcher who has widely collaborated with the extreme figure Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, the personal assistant of the anti-democracy, anti-equality figure Curtis Yarvin (Yarvin himself wasn't attending, although he did organize an afterparty at his house for Manifest attendees), and the highly controversial excommunicated rationalist Michael Vassar, who has been described as “a cult leader” involved in some people having a psychotic breaks due to heavy psychedelics use[2] (according an organiser Vassar did not end up coming to the event, but there were people involved with him that were present who said he might be dropping by and that he had bought a ticket). Manifest co-organiser Saul expanding on the Vassar situation here.
Among the people listed as special guests for LessOnline and Manifest I would be comfortable putting a total of eight people under the eugenics/HBD label. There might be more, but I am not an expert. In addition to those eight there were multiple prominent people taking part in the three events as attendees who clearly fall under this umbrella. I am not tallying Scott Alexander or Steve Hsu here, although both of them seemed and do seem at least sympathetic to some subset of HBD beliefs (I do get that this might be a controversial opinion to express here, and if you feel offended by this feel free to ignore this aside).
The race science people were fairly welcoming. As long as you didn’t react to their hot takes with a strong emotional outburst, didn't use too many leftie shibboleths, and had a modicum of social skills, you could, like, hang out. If you were fun to hang around with, you probably were also invited to the Curtis Yarvin afterparty as well. The party featured almost every single person from the three events that fell under the category "vaguely racist" (the more cringy or overtly racist ones weren’t invited), along with many people who were there probably just out of sheer curiosity (these included some pretty famous people within the community, but I am not naming names). Newbies thought that the party was kind of lame, and the amount of controversial things being said was only about half a notch worse than what was already being said after midnight during Manifest when people didn’t have as many social guards up. Anti-trans sentiment, however, appeared to be way higher during the Yarvin party, even if race stuff was not much worse. And wow, some people really do idolize this Yarvin dude.
Takeaways
I do not live in the Bay Area. I do not know how representative of the Bay Area rationalism these events were. But I do think that these events featured a very problematic undercurrent in the rationalism community.
It is probably wise to have a stronger separation between EA and rationalism. Many people attend both rationalist meetups and EA meetups. Out of all the communities that have an overlap with the EA community, the rationalist community has the largest intersection. I think the EA community should strive to hold itself to a higher standard, and to the degree where we can affect what goes on with the rationalist community, we should at least demand them not to platform highly controversial figures with ideas way outside the Overton window.
Yes, it is true that these events weren't EA events per se, but they featured prominent EAs, forecasting is sometimes considered to be a niche EA cause area, and rationalists and AI safety people are extremely intertwined. EA will be associated with what happens at events like these. If we don't want these things to be associated with EA, add some distance. Some of the more good things that might come out of strong interest in genetics can be presented in a way that does not invite controversy. A hyperbolic example not strictly about anyone specific in particular: want to create healthier and smarter babies? Great! Having speakers who choose to express opinions on the Holocaust as an eugenic event during that presentation? Not so great! And now a non-insignificant portion of the audience is people who were attracted to the controversy. Even the good parts of a controversial idea are ruined if you have the wrong person talking about it.
[Edit: People have begun to object to this part of the text, since it was quite clear who I was loosely referring to here. I regret using this as an example, and I think the presence of the person holding this specific talk was way more justified and less likely to attract a bad crowd than many other controversial speakers. I do not think this speaker is an anti-semite. I'm leaving this reference in the text for posterity in a slightly edited form that I hope makes my point a little bit clearer.]
Closing words with some extra ramblings and loose thoughts about vibes
I am releasing this post under a pseudonym, because I really don’t know how much talking about this topic with my real name and face might hurt my future interactions with the rationalist community. It might turn out to have zero effect, but I dunno maybe the Manifest people and Lightcone would kind of dislike me or something.
LessWrong was where I first came across EA, and both communities have been important to me at different points in my life. In general I do identify more with the EA movement, and the vibes of both communities feel like they have diverged quite a bit. If I’d have to vaguely point to a specific difference in the vibes of an EAs and those of rats, I would say EAs feel more innocent whereas rats might, with possibly a little bit too much generalization, feel like they’d rank higher in some dark triad traits and feature more of chuunibyou tendencies sprinkled with a dash of narrative addiction.
I don’t really feel like many people in the rationalist community communicate very openly or honestly, even though non-deception is often thought to be one of their core tenets. I’m not sure how much this vibe can be explained by being exposed to the older iterations of LessWrong, where high-decouplers would discuss pick-up-artistry way beyond the bar for manipulation, where people might commit to naive utilitarianism at the expense of common sense, and where a small sub-community would obsess over scientific racism and group IQ differences (a sub-community which arguably gave rise to the modern alt-right, even though this honor might not be something they hold in high regard).
Anyways, those were some of my grievances about some of the special guests and a non-insignificant portion of the attendee base. In general I did have a good time at these events, even if some of the attendees did bum me out. I would probably go again, especially if whoever is responsible for choosing the speakers tones it down with the controversial special guests. But who knows, maybe next time half the people there will consist of Republicans and the Thielosphere[3]. Let me know what you think, but I won't promise to reply in the comments.
- ^
I assume mostly because you really do need quite a lot of evidence to make a claim about someone in media and not get sued for slander.
- ^
One source from Scott Alexander here. Linked because this sounds like a shocking claim and I am not sure how widely people gossip about this stuff. For the rest of the people mentioned I refrained from linking to them.
- ^
Thiel is tied to Yarvin, who is tied to race stuff.
meta
what is manifest about? what ought manifest be about?
although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it's also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc. i'd recommend readers look through our special guest list and come to their own opinion about manifest; we had about sixty such special guests, and i think some aggregation of all of them probably amounts to a much more accurate read of the intellectual vibe at manifest than any selected subset of guests.
and i want to note that some edge is fine (and good!) — but it’s fine & good as a byproduct of a good event-building process, not as a goal at which i’d like to intentionally aim.
i don’t want manifest to be a conference for edgelords, and i don’t want manifest to be known as such. if it is, i’ve failed.
…but i don’t think i’ve failed! my guess is that most people can attend manifest and never interact with someone who they consider racist. the average response on the feedback form was a 9/10, and of the negative responses, the vast majority were about long lines for the bathrooms, not about racists. this was also true of qualitative reactions i heard during the event; @Nathan Young 's comment gets into this really well.[1]
my guess is that, on the margin, i’d have liked to have a bunch more folks at manifest who’re sorta unrelated to discussions about race. some specific people i invited and who weren’t able to make it include andy matsuschak, judea pearl, jason matheny, and many others. i don’t think we hit this balance perfectly, but i also don’t think we were off-base. i’ll touch on this more in a moment, but i wanted to make on thing really clear:
separate "attended" from "invited"
manifest is not an application-based or invite-only event. you buy a ticket, and you show up.
two exceptions to that general rule:
we have a high bar for banning people from the event, and we also have a pretty high bar for giving people free tickets. the vast majority (~4/5?) of the attendees at manifest fell into the category of “bought a ticket, showed up.”
again: the vast majority of attendees simply bought a ticket and showed up.
i think that nonhuman animal suffering is an atrocious blight on humanity's moral track record. but if the person who most strongly endorsed nonhuman animal suffering bought a ticket to manifest and showed up, i would've let them into the event — and for context on that statement, i've taken the pledge and donated ~all of my pledged funds thus far to various animal welfare organizations.
and this framework extends more broadly, to folks who hold views that you might consider abhorrent: e.g. we did not give curtis yarvin a free ticket to attend manifest, but if he had bought a ticket and showed up, i would've let him in. (however, yarvin didn’t buy a ticket, and didn’t attend.)
…but we’re also responsible for who buys tickets.
if we invite a bunch of edgy speakers, and then a bunch of edgelords buy tickets, we can’t reasonably claim that we’re not responsible for creating an edgy vibe.
i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy), and not by intentionally cutting our average edginess. anodynity is a really bad goal to aim for. you can see in one of our notes docs on april 22 that we explicitly wanted to invite more “warm/kind/gracious” people, and this was directly to have the speaker makeup more accurately reflect our interests.
like, c’mon — we had fifty seven speakers! look through them, and evaluate for yourself if the 8 that this article describes is an accurate representation of our speakers overall.
a few specific corrections
this is technically true, but a bit misleading. Lightcone owns & operates the venue (Lighthaven), so by a stretched interpretation of "host," this is true of every event that occurs at Lighthaven. but more realistically:
and, more specifically:
i can clarify further if you’d find it helpful, but this is the gist of the split.
uh, so, my guess is that you mean something like “it’s bad to invite speakers who think the holocaust is {fake, good, etc}.” i agree with this take, but the way that you’ve currently phrased this is pretty ambiguous in a way that seems quite unhelpful. to take an obviously hyperbolic example, i myself have pretty strong opinions on the holocaust: my grandparents survived torture & starvation in various death camps, and my opinions are, roughly, “the holocaust was (strongly) bad.”
i’d like to understand your wording better, and i’d encourage you to edit your original wording to reflect what you actually mean as well as the thing that you’re actually critiquing. e.g., did such a speaker come to manifest? what was the view that they actually endorsed? what norm do you think that violates? etc.
independently, i’d also like to know if any special guests explicitly endorsed the holocaust as being good or fake — i’d probably be a lot less interested in giving them a free ticket next time.
to repeat:
i think that there is a lot here that i could write a lot about. in my experience, it's vastly more productive to have these sorts of dialogues over a video call or face-to-face. so:
if you’re actually interested in improving community dynamics, talking to me (or the other organizers) IRL or over video call is probably the most effective way to do so; and i’d actively encourage it.
i do think there’s a bit of a selection effect, where those most hurt by a racist vibe would probably have not come (or would have left early, etc). again, if this prevented great folks who would otherwise have attended the event from coming, i think i’ve failed them, and i’d seek to do better for the next event.
The post complains about "scientific racists" at the conference, with there being a minimum of eight:
We can debate whether it's closer to eight or closer to twelve but let's take eight as the conservative estimate. You say:
And:
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